But the tendency of the workers to drunkenness shocks a certain religious preacher, who traces the vice to idleness and sport. He goes about the island urging upon them a higher morality. They widely receive him as a divine messenger, and under his exhortation they become more industrious and more conscientious in their work; not only working more hours, and curtailing their sport, but in every hour using more diligence. In consequence, the masters are enriched by stores somewhat embarrassing. Grain comes in, more than they want: their barns begin to overflow. Garments are too many for the warehouses. Huge piles of timber block up the yards, besides masses of stones, and heaps of other superfluous material. Before long, the masters conclude that their simplest course for checking supply is by lessening the number of the workmen. The increased diligence of the people (we may suppose) has made the work of three men on an average as efficient in all tasks as were _five_ men previously. Thus sixty do the work of a hundred; and the masters discover that what had been the normal average produce will be maintained, if they dismiss forty out of every hundred dependents. Not only so; but retaining their usual surplus, which we may call their rent, at the old level, they will be able to raise the wages to these workmen whom they still keep, since instead of a hundred they will have only sixty now to feed and clothe; and only for these do they feel morally responsible. Forthwith they actually dismiss forty out of every hundred. Each landowner cares for his own workmen as by a sort of social duty; but for those who are discharged he feels no responsibility. In the average result the landowners who had had a hundred workmen, but now only sixty, take as increased rent the food and clothes of ten, and use it to add ten servants to their domestic retinue, but add to the wage of the sixty whom they keep at work, the food and clothes previously received by thirty of the forty whom they have dismissed. Thus they raise wages by one half--that is, they pay in the proportion of one hundred and fifty instead of one hundred. The labourers, clothworkers, and builders who are dismissed (the remaining thirty out of every hundred) being without work and without houses, are at once in a state of beggary. Only by betaking themselves to some _new industry_ will they be able to get a livelihood, and it rests with them to devise their new industries. Meanwhile they can only subsist on charity, which is doled out to them chiefly by the fellow feeling of those of their class who are still in work. The increased wages of these enable them to be liberal; in fact, the increase has on an average been just what the discarded men previously earned.